The Kennedy Brothers: The Rise and Fall of Jack and Bobby Read Online Free Page A

particular trip, there were hardly any provisions and the stove didn’t work, so they subsisted on doughnuts. Most everyone by the end of the second day was exhausted; some were seasick. “But Bobby just loved it.” Exposed to the natural elements — wind and water, snow and sun — Bobby came alive. Danger was a beckoning, a reminder of the fickleness of life. “Living each day,” Bobby often said after Jack’s death, “is like Russian roulette.”
    To brave those odds was what Joe Kennedy had imbued in his sons, but he himself began to have second thoughts. When he saw the TV footage of Bobby in mountain gear, readying himself for the climb of Mount Kennedy, the old man exploded in monosyllabic wrath, “Naaaa!” He tore out newspaper articles about the climb and threw them on the floor. “Bobby didn’t know,” Lem Billings said, “that his father was trying to stop this thing that had gotten started — this Kennedy thing of daring the gods. ” 25
    Bobby himself thought it was too late. His fate was set. He plumbed Shakespeare and the Greek tragedies and found an emotional sanctuary in their depiction of the cruelty of life and the price of arrogance. He now saw himself and his family in a tragic light. When the poet Robert Lowell once suggested that Kennedy could be cast as Falstaff, Kennedy said that instead he should be Henry the Fifth. Lowell thought this “trite” and reminded Kennedy of Hal’s misadventure: he died young, failed on the battlefield, and his son was murdered. Bobby walked over to a collection of Shakespeare’s historical plays and turned to Henry the Fourth’s death speech, which he read, including the line, “The canker’d heaps of strange-achieved gold.” When he’d finished, Bobby said, “Henry the Fourth. That’s my father.” 26 Bobby recognized that he was doomed — and this became the basis for his rebirth.

November 2, 1966
    New York City
    B obby spent the day campaigning for Frank O’Connor, who was running against incumbent Nelson Rockefeller for the governorship of New York. At the four street corner rallies in Midtown Manhattan that day the crowds were disappointingly small. Kennedy said almost nothing about the merits of O’Connor’s candidacy except that he would win. Instead Bobby criticized Rockefeller’s program of mandatory treatment for drug offenders, pointing out that California’s system of voluntary treatment at community clinics and shelters worked far better. It was not exactly a rallying cry, but at least he had fulfilled a political obligation. At the last rally, Bobby spotted two nurses who had served as volunteers in his 1964 Senate race. He invited them and journalist Jack Newfield back to his UN Plaza apartment for a drink.
    Newfield would later describe it as an awkward scene. Bobby would talk to his former volunteers about their jobs, their families, asking them what they thought of the speeches that day, and then turn to Newfield and discuss the St. Louis Cardinals’ backfield. The young women soon left. Bobby asked Newfield with some embarrassment if he liked poetry. Newfield said he did.
    “Can I read you some poetry by a poet I like very much?” Kennedy asked. He disappeared into the bedroom and returned with a thin, dog-eared volume. Silhouetted against a neon Pepsi-Cola sign in Queens, he began to read a poem by Ralph Waldo Emerson:
He pays too high a price
For knowledge and for fame
Who sells his sinews to be wise,
His teeth and bones to buy a name,
And crawls through life a paralytic
To earn the praise of bard and critic
     
Were it not better done,
To dine and sleep through forty years;
Be loved by a few; be feared by none;
Laugh life away, have wine for tears;
And take the mortal leap undaunted,
Content that all we asked was granted?
     
But Fate will not permit
The seed of gods to die
Nor suffer sense to win from wit
Its guerdon in the sky,
Nor let us hide, whate’er our pleasure,
The world’s light underneath a